The Silenced Majority

The troops marched slowly up the road, their U.S.-made
M-16s in the ready position. It was November 12, 1991, a day that
would forever be seared into my memory, and into history. I was
in Dili, the capital of East Timor, a small island nation 300 miles
north of Australia. East Timor had been brutally occupied by Indonesian
troops for sixteen years, since they invaded in 1975. The Indonesian
military had sealed off East Timor from the outside world and turned
it into their private killing field. A third of the population —
200,000 Timorese — had died. It was one of the worst genocides
of the late twentieth century.

I had just attended mass at the main church in Dili with Allan
Nairn, journalist and activist, then writing for The New Yorker
magazine. After the service, thousands marched toward the Santa
Cruz cemetery to remember Sebastian Gomes, yet another young man
killed by Indonesian soldiers. The people came from all over: workplaces,
homes, villages, and farms. They traveled through a geography of
pain: In almost every other building, Timorese had been held or
tortured, disappeared or killed. Whether it was a police station
or a military barracks, a hotel or an officer’s house, no place
was beyond reach of the terror. Not even the church was safe. It
was about 8 a.m. when we reached the cemetery.

We had asked people along the way: "Why are you marching?
Why are you risking your lives to do this?"

"I’m doing it for my mother," one replied. "I’m
doing it for my father," said another. "I’m doing it for
freedom."

In the distance, we heard an eerie, synchronized beat. Suddenly
we saw them. Many hundreds of Indonesian troops coming up the road,
twelve to fifteen abreast. People grew very quiet.

We knew the Indonesian military had committed many massacres in
the past, but never in front of Western journalists. Allan suggested
we walk to the front of the crowd, hoping that our presence could
head off what looked like an impending attack. I put on my headphones,
took out my tape recorder — I usually kept these hidden so as not
to endanger Timorese caught talking to us — and held up my microphone
like a flag. Allan put his camera above his head, and we went and
stood in the middle of the road, about fifteen yards in front of
the crowd. By visibly showing the tools of our trade, we hoped to
alert the troops that this time they were being watched.

A hush fell over the Timorese. Those in the back could run, but
the thousands of people in front were trapped by the cemetery walls
that lined both sides of the road. The main sound was the rhythmic
thump of boots hitting the road as the troops marched in unison
toward the people. Children whispered behind us. Then, without any
warning or provocation, the soldiers rounded the corner, swept past
us, raised their U.S.-made weapons, and opened fire.

People were ripped apart. The troops just kept shooting, moving
their guns from left to right, killing anyone still standing.

A group of soldiers surrounded me. They started to shake my microphone
in my face as if to say, This is what we don’t want. Then
they slammed me to the ground with their rifle butts and started
to kick me with their boots. I gasped for breath. Allan threw himself
on top of me to protect me from further injury.

The soldiers wielded their M-16s like baseball bats. They slammed
them against Allan’s head until they fractured his skull. For a
moment, Allan lay in the road in spasm, covered in blood, unable
to move. Suddenly, about a dozen soldiers lined up like a firing
squad. They put the guns to our heads and screamed, "Politik!
Politik!" They were accusing us of being involved in politics,
a crime clearly punishable by death. They also demanded, "Australia?
Australia?"

We understood what was at stake with this question. In October
1975, Indonesian soldiers had executed five Australia-based television
journalists in an attempt to cover up a military incursion leading
up to the December 7, 1975, invasion of East Timor. On December
8, Australian journalist Roger East, the only other Western reporter
left in East Timor, was dragged out of a radio station in Dili down
to the harbor and shot.

Almost exactly sixteen years later, as Allan and I lay on the ground
surrounded by Indonesian soldiers, we shouted, "No, we’re from
America!" They had stripped us of our possessions, but I still
had my passport. I threw it at them. When I regained my breath,
I said again, "We’re from America! America!"

Finally, the soldiers lowered their guns from our heads. We think
it was because we were from the same country their weapons were
from. They would have to pay a price for killing us that they never
had to pay for killing Timorese.

At least 271 Timorese died that day, in what became known as the
Santa Cruz massacre. Indonesian troops went on killing for days.
It was not even one of the larger massacres in East Timor, and it
wouldn’t be the last. It was simply the first to be witnessed by
outsiders.

"A Sanctuary for Dissent"

Going to where the silence is. That is the responsibility
of a journalist: giving a voice to those who have been forgotten,
forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful. It is the best reason
I know to carry our pens, cameras, and microphones into our own
communities and out to the wider world.

I am a journalist from Pacifica Radio, the only independent media
network broadcasting in the United States. It was founded in 1949
by a man named Lew Hill, a pacifist who had refused to fight in
World War II. When he came out of a detention camp after the war,
he said the United States needed a media outlet that wasn’t run
by corporations profiting from war. His vision was of an independent
network run by journalists and artists — not by "corporations
with nothing to tell and everything to sell that are raising our
children today," in the words of journalism professor George
Gerbner, founder of the "cultural environment" movement.

KPFA, the first Pacifica station, began in Berkeley, California.
FM radio was in its infancy at the time, so KPFA had to make and
give out FM radios in order for people to hear the station. As would
happen so many times in the decades that followed, Pacifica Radio
tried something no one thought would work — building a network
based on the financial support of individual listeners. This marked
the birth of listener-sponsored media in this country, a model later
used by National Public Radio and public television.

The Pacifica network grew to five stations: KPFA in Berkeley, KPFK
in Los Angeles, WBAI in New York, WPFW in Washington, and KPFT in
Houston. In 1970, KPFT became the only radio station in the United
States to have its transmitter blown up. The Ku Klux Klan did it.
In 1981, the KKK’s Grand Wizard claimed that his greatest act "was
engineering the bombing of a left-wing radio station," because
he understood how dangerous Pacifica was.

Pacifica is a sanctuary for dissent. In the fifties, when the legendary
singer and African-American leader Paul Robeson was whitelisted
during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts, banned from almost
every public space in the United States but for a few black churches,
he knew he could go to KPFA and be heard. The great writer James
Baldwin, debating Malcolm X about the effectiveness of nonviolent
sit-ins in the South, broadcast over the airwaves of WBAI.

Today, Pacifica continues that tradition. My colleagues at WBAI,
including Elombe Brath and the late Samori Marksman, have taught
me how a local radio station can be the gateway to a rich world.
Samori was a pan-Africanist who taught me so much about the history
of Africa and the Caribbean. Elombe Brath has long provided a voice
for leaders of African liberation movements. These men made the
whole world our community. Great African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah,
Sékou Touré, and Julius Nyerere were local voices
to WBAI’s listeners. In his role as WBAI program director, Samori
would call me into his office under the pretext of discussing some
bureaucratic minutiae. I would emerge three hours later, newly educated
about a liberation movement in Africa or the Caribbean.

It’s still much the same. On any given day, you can listen to the
news on CNN or National Public Radio, then tune in to a Pacifica
station. You would think you were hearing reports from different
planets.

We inhabit the same planet, but we see it through different lenses.
On community airwaves, color isn’t what sports commentators provide,
and it isn’t the preserve of a "diversity" reporter. We
are a cross section of races, ethnicities, and social classes explaining
the world we see around us.

Take, for example, my WBAI colleague Errol Maitland. In March 2000,
while he was reporting live from the funeral of Patrick Dorismond
— a Haitian-American who was shot and killed by police — Errol
attempted to interview New York City police who were moving in on
the crowd of mourners. We listened as he tried to question police,
who then threw him to the ground. Errol was beaten by New York City
police officers and had to be hospitalized for weeks. When I visited
him in the hospital, I found him handcuffed to his bed. All for
what? For reporting while black.

It was stories like Errol’s, in New York and around the world,
that my WBAI colleague Bernard White and I took on each day for
a decade on the morning show Wake Up Call. We heard people
speak for themselves, instead of hearing them defined by officialdom.
Bernard, a former New York City schoolteacher, has deep roots in
the community. Whether in the classroom, on air, or as Samori’s
successor as WBAI program director, Bernard’s idea of education
is to have people tell their own stories, document their own lives.

I began hosting Democracy Now! in 1996, when it was launched
as the only daily election show in public broadcasting. Listener
response was enormous. Suddenly the daily struggles of ordinary
people — workers, immigrants, artists, the employed and the unemployed,
those with homes and those without, dissidents, soldiers, people
of color — were dignified as news. I call it trickle-up journalism.
These are the voices that shape movements — movements that make
history. These are people who change the world just as much as generals,
bankers, and politicians. They are the mainstream, yet they are
ignored by the mainstream media.

After the 1996 election, we decided to continue the show as a daily
grassroots political newshour. When the media began beating the
drums of war after September 11, 2001, Democracy Now! expanded
to television and became the largest public media collaboration
in the country. We now broadcast on hundreds of community radio
and public access TV stations. We beam out over satellite television
and stream on the Internet at www.democracynow.org.

Why has Democracy Now! grown so quickly? Because of the
deafening silence in the mainstream media around the issues — and
the people — that matter most. People are now confronting the most
important issues of the millennium: war and peace, life and death.
Yet who is shaping the discourse? Generals, corporate executives,
and government officials.

In a media landscape where there are more channels than ever, the
lack of any diversity of opinion is breathtaking — and boring.
As my colleague Juan Gonzalez often says, "You can surf through
hundreds of channels before you realize there is nothing on TV."
In a society where freedom of the press is enshrined in the Constitution,
our media largely acts as a megaphone for those in power.

That’s why people are so hungry for independent media — and are
starting to make their own.

Muzzling Dissent

Vibrant debateand dissent exist
in this country, but you are not reading or hearing about this in
the mainstream press.

If you are opposed to war, you are not a fringe minority. You are
not a silent majority. You are part of a silenced majority. Silenced
by the mainstream media.

After 9/11 the media personalities on television — you can’t call
many of them journalists — kept saying that 90 percent of Americans
were for war.

Were you ever called and asked your views? And if you were, what
were you asked? Because if someone called and asked, "Do you
believe the killing of innocent civilians should be avenged by the
killing of innocent civilians?" I’m sure that 90 percent of
Americans would say no. We are a compassionate people. But people
cannot take action if they don’t have accurate information.

Politicians who never met a war they didn’t like (and in the case
of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, never fought in any of them) began
to beat the drums of war after 9/11. Corporations chimed in, knowing
they could make a killing off of killing. And then came the mainstream
media to manufacture consent, as Noam Chomsky puts it.

To understand how the media shape the message, look at who the
messengers are. The media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
(FAIR) did a study of the "experts" who appeared on-camera
on the major network news shows during the critical week before
and week after February 5, 2003 — the day Secretary of State Colin
Powell made his case to the UN Security Council for invading Iraq.
This was at a time when 61 percent of Americans supported more time
for diplomacy and inspections. The FAIR study found only 3 of 393
sources — fewer than 1 percent — were affiliated with antiwar
activism.

Three out of almost 400 interviews. And that was on the
"respectable" evening news shows of CBS, NBC, ABC, and
PBS.

So if you ran to the bathroom while watching TV during that critical
two-week period — sorry! You might have missed the only dissenting
viewpoint the network news offered.

This is not a media that is serving a democratic society, where
a diversity of views is vital to shaping informed opinions. This
is a well-oiled propaganda machine that is repackaging government
spin and passing it off as journalism.

Why does it matter? Well, consider the alternative: Imagine if
instead of 3 voices against the war, the networks allowed 200 war
skeptics on the air — roughly the proportion of the public opposed
to war.

And imagine if the U.S. media showed uncensored, hellish images
of war — even for one week. What impact would that have? I think
we would be able to abolish war.

Instead, after our loved ones and neighbors followed orders and
marched off to war (unlike the children of the top warmakers), the
networks showed us a colorful, video-game version of what was going
on.

In Iraq, the U.S. government discouraged independent coverage of
the war — sometimes at gunpoint. And when the remains of dead soldiers
began coming back, the Bush administration ordered curtains to be
erected when the planes off-loaded the flag-draped coffins at Dover
Air Force Base. In fact, the administration has enforced a ban on
any filming of returning caskets. As of early 2004, with more than
500 dead Americans and over 11,000 wounded or medically evacuated,
Bush had not attended a single funeral for a soldier killed in action
during his presidency, either from Afghanistan or Iraq. The Bush
team has invoked a basic principle of propaganda: Control the images
and you control the people.

The lesson had been learned from Vietnam — a lesson in manipulation.
In Iraq, there would be no daily television images of the human
toll of war. The government and the media would portray a clean
war, a war nearly devoid of victims.

Breaking the Sound Barrier

It is absolutely critical right now to break the
sound barrier when it comes to dissent. The U.S. government has
used the war on terror as its rationale for the biggest crackdown
on civil liberties since the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Right now,
people are being thrown in jail without charges. Men from the Middle
East and South Asia are being singled out as enemies. Lawyers defending
dissidents are under attack.

These are the first warnings. You could be next.

The U.S. Constitution has been swept aside by myriad draconian
measures that are part of the USA Patriot Act.
When George W. Bush and his foot soldiers can’t build an airtight
legal case, suspicion and xenophobia will suffice. Prisoners classified
by the U.S. president as "enemy combatants" can now be
tried by military tribunals on ships docked in foreign waters, beyond
the protective reach of the Bill of Rights. Some are being tortured
to pry information out of them. Hundreds of foreign nationals are
presently being detained by the United States — at Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, and Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — without knowing
the charges against them. We don’t know the defendants’ names or
their purported crimes, and they don’t hear the evidence against
them. According to a November 13, 2001, presidential order, their
trials can be held in secret and they can be found guilty by a tribunal
of military judges chosen by the secretary of defense. If the tribunal
unanimously sentences the prisoner to death, he or she can be executed.
We would know nothing of the case, and those with knowledge of the
tribunals’ actions are forbidden to speak about them.

If there was an honest discourse in the mainstream media, if we
really did present alternatives to kangaroo court justice and war,
people would be able to imagine a much wider range of options. That
is one of the media’s most serious responsibilities, to open up
the discussion.

The silenced majority is chafing behind the corporate media muzzle.
Lines are breaking down between Democrats and Republicans, conservatives
and liberals. Conservatives, like progressives, care deeply about
privacy, about corporate control of their lives. People across the
political spectrum are outraged by the profiteering corporations
— Bush’s corporate criminal sponsors, including Enron, WorldCom,
and Halliburton — robbing our treasury, raiding our pensions, ravaging
our wilderness areas, and running away with the loot.

More and more people are saying no to government lies, corporate
greed, and a slavish media.